I want to talk about ethnography because I am in a mood. New York City is a very unique place because it contains many 'native' New York ethnicties, by which I do not mean Amero-Siberians (American Indians)1, but rather ethnicities that are wholly unique to New York2 despite looking somewhat phenotypically similar to people who are supposedly the same race. A good example of this which has been quite interesting is New York Blacks.
New York has a very different history of slavery (and yes it was at a time the most populous area but there is a lot of nuance to discuss here, follow along), and what history of slavery it did was the common form of slavery before the whole plantation-slave complex3 was established in the vile southron baronies.
The very first non-Indigenous person to settle in what became New York was Juan Rodriguez4, a free man of African and Portuguese descent who arrived from Santo Domingo in 1613 and spent the winter of 1613-1614 trading with local Munsee Lunaape peoples as a representative of Dutch fur traders. When the Dutch West India Company officially established New Amsterdam in 1624, they soon brought eleven enslaved Africans, but by 1644 these same men successfully petitioned Director General Willem Kieft for their freedom, becoming "half-free" and receiving5 land grants in what became known as the "Land of the Blacks6" near the Fresh Water Pond (now the site of Chinatown).
Men like Simon Congo, Pieter San Tome, Anthony Portuguese7, and Manuel de Gerrit DeReus established the first geographically designated Black community in New York, farming land from lower Manhattan to midtown and serving as a buffer between Dutch colonists and Native American communities. This made it a very interesting place for Free Africans to come and to settle and set up lives, and some did, and we have their stories and record.
Under Dutch rule, enslaved people in New Amsterdam had rights unheard of in other colonies, they could testify in court, sue whites8 for lost wages, own property, marry in the Dutch Reformed Church, and bear arms when the colony was threatened.
As one 1639 court record shows9, "Manuel, the commandant's servant" was able to collect "15 guilders, which are due to him from Hendrick Frederickson for wages", wages for work performed outside his enslaved duties.
When the English took over in 1664, the Dutch freed about 40 people10 who had been granted half-slave status to prevent the English from keeping them enslaved. The city's early Black community included figures like David Ruggles11, who became a prominent abolitionist in the 1830s and helped establish New York as a center for the Underground Railroad, and the Lyons family12, who operated successful businesses while fighting for civil rights throughout the 19th century.
They led fascinating lives, sometimes from aristocratic or noble families from their homeland, sometimes they were slavers or spice traders, other times they were slaves who had been freed and naturally sought out the biggest and more diverse and tolerant city on the continent. In the same period that New Amsterdam was being established, African kingdoms like Kongo13 were sending their own ambassadors and nobles to Europe via the same Atlantic routes. Antonio Manuel, Marquis of Ne Vunda14, was sent as Kongo's ambassador to the Vatican in 1604, traveling through Brazil before reaching Rome (where he died in 1608 and was buried with great honors by Pope Paul V, with a marble bust still displayed in Santa Maria Maggiore). Miguel de Castro15 served as Kongo's ambassador to the Netherlands in the 1640s.
These were educated, literate men from a kingdom with schools, libraries16, and a sophisticated diplomatic corps that maintained correspondence with European monarchs. Some of the free Africans who reached New York likely came from similar backgrounds, displaced members of African elite families, former traders who had operated between African kingdoms and European trading posts, or people who had gained their freedom and education through the complex networks that connected Africa, the Caribbean, and North America.
This large amount of free black people along with many who never knew the horror of slavery created a distinctly unique New York black culture, one that persists to this day. It is hard to explain until you come here yourself, there is a stark difference between New York Blacks, Great Migration Blacks, Caribbean17 Blacks, Latino Blacks, and African Immigrants, all 3 of these groups are quite different and often do not get along.
The Caribbean community alone represents incredible diversity, by 1930, nearly a quarter of Harlem was Caribbean-born, but this included Jamaicans, Barbadians, Trinidadians, Haitians, and others who often formed their own distinct mutual aid societies like the "Sons and Daughters of Barbados" and the "Trinidad Benevolent Association," each preserving their island-specific cultures while also competing for jobs and housing with other Black communities. While this cultural complexity exists, I suppose it is worth noting that these boundaries have become more fluid over generations, with intermarriage and shared experiences creating new hybrid identities, though the underlying cultural patterns remain observable.
I also want to talk about 'Great Migration Blacks' because when Americans think of 'Blacks'/'Africans' they are 99% of the time talking about the ethnicity & culture of Great Migration Blacks. These people came to the North during the great migration in massive numbers often times emptying out entire towns in the deep south to move north for the factory jobs. The scale of this movement was unprecedented, between 1910 and 1970, approximately six million African Americans left the South, with the first great wave occurring during World War I when northern factories desperately needed workers18.
Many Americans often overlook many of the cultural behaviors of Great Migration Blacks to be unique to them and often look down on them, racists will often act like they are somehow lessening the culture. The truth is though, Great Migration Blacks are distinctly southern, distinctly deep southern19, and their cultural folkways cannot be separated from their origins. The desperation that drove this migration can be heard in the migrants' own words.
As one wrote from Houston in 191720: "wanted to leave the South and Go and Place where a man will Be any thing Except A Ker... so long as I Go where a man is a man."
Another from Troy, Alabama21 wrote about lynchings: "So many of our people here are almost starving... would go any where to better their conditions."
The kind of racism that Northerners conjure about Great Migration Blacks is often the same kind of things that they said about the whites living there and their culture before the Civil War.
Before the Great Migration most of the Blacks in the North had assimilated somewhat to White culture, often intermixing with the locals, forming distinct subcommunities of what people called 'Mullatos', mixed people22. These people were themselves starkly different from the Great Migration Blacks that would come to settle in their areas, and their meeting caused an instant cultural class and warfare that can still be felt to this day in the "Dark Skin vs Light Skin" phenomenon. Where "Light Skin" often serves as a visual fill in for an actual cultural difference, Light Skins act more like Yankees and are much more integrated into the Northern culture, Dark Skins act Southern and have a mutual distaste with Yankee culture in whatever color it appears.
This tension wasn't just about color but about fundamentally different ways of life, the established northern Black communities had developed their own institutions, social patterns, and relationships with white society over generations, while the southern migrants brought different religious practices, speech patterns, and cultural expectations that sometimes clashed with existing norms.
The Caribbean immigrants added yet another layer of complexity, many were more educated than both the established northern Blacks and the Great Migration Blacks, and came with their own ideas about race, class, and politics. Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican founder23 of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, exemplified this dynamic when he arrived in New York in 1916 and had to serve as what he called "a cultural broker" between West Indians and African Americans, finding that the roughly 100,000 Caribbean immigrants in Harlem often felt "culturally superior" to both groups.
Nowadays the Light vs Dark difference has devolved into simple colorism, but the lines are still somewhat there revealing their causal origin, if not much less stark than during the Great Migration. An interesting thing is that Great Migration Blacks are the most verbal and active defenders of any 'Southern Culture' in this country, even Southern whites often assimilate into whatever West Coast or Northern culture they move to, but Great Migration Blacks have been distinctly proud of their culture and refused to give it up.
One migrant who moved to Philadelphia24 captured this perfectly, writing in 1917: "I dont have to mister every little white boy comes along I havent heard a white man call a colored a nxxxxr... since I been in the state of Pa. I can ride in the electric street and steam cars any where I get a seat... yet amid all this I shall ever love the good old South."
This cultural strength to me is quite admirable, and it is why for such a small group of people I believe they are so strong and influential culturally. They have incredible influence and strength, and I think it owes to how strong of a culture they possess, certainly something they should be proud of!
Anyways I know if you're American this may be all super obvious to you, but if you are not I hope this ramble-lesson was interesting, I feel like people often think of not just Blacks but Whites, Latinos, every group here, as a monolith and the lines they draw are often too wide to be interesting and accurate. The reality is even more complex because these groups weren't just competing, they were also collaborating, learning from each other, and creating entirely new cultural forms.
The blues that Great Migration Blacks brought north mixed with Caribbean rhythms and New York sophistication to remake jazz25. The political organizing techniques that Caribbean intellectuals learned from British colonial systems influenced how Great Migration Blacks approached labor organizing. The business networks that established northern Black families had built became pathways for both southern migrants and Caribbean immigrants to establish themselves economically.
Today, you can still see these cultural distinctions playing out in subtle but observable ways across New York. In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the Labor Day Caribbean Carnival26 brings out distinctly Caribbean cultural expressions, steel drums, elaborate costumes, Caribbean patois mixing with English, that feel totally different from the cultural expressions you'd find at a traditional Black church service in Harlem descended from Great Migration traditions, with its call-and-response patterns, specific musical styles, and southern-inflected religious practices.
The food cultures alone tell the story: Caribbean communities maintain roti shops, jerk chicken spots, and restaurants serving curry goat, while Great Migration communities preserved southern foodways like collard greens cooked with pig feet or turkey necks, cornbread, and black-eyed peas, dishes that "evoke memories of smells, sights and sounds that are directly tied to our shared cultural memories."
The truth is America is an extremely extremely diverse country with cultures that are wildly different even if they both 'look similar' on the face, America is probably the one country in the world where it is the easiest to see how much more ethnicity & culture matters in terms of how people act as opposed to race. This pattern repeats across virtually every immigrant group, Italian-Americans from different regions, Jewish communities from different countries, even white Appalachian migrants to northern cities faced similar cultural preservation vs. assimilation tensions, though often without the added complexity of racial discrimination.
What makes the Black American experience unique is how these cultural differences became racialized and therefore politicized in ways that other immigrant experiences weren't, when Italian-Americans from Sicily clashed with those from Naples, it rarely became a matter of national political discourse, but when Great Migration Blacks and Caribbean Blacks had cultural tensions, it could influence everything from labor organizing to civil rights strategy to artistic movements like the Harlem Renaissance.
Since 2000, African immigrants have become the fastest-growing segment of the Black population, bringing yet another set of cultural practices, languages, and political perspectives. Nigerian communities in the Bronx, Ethiopian enclaves in parts of Manhattan, and Ghanaian communities in Queens each maintain distinct cultural institutions while navigating relationships with established African American communities. Meanwhile, gentrification has forced many of these communities to move, Caribbean communities have shifted from Harlem to places like Flatbush and Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, while many Great Migration families have been priced out entirely, some ironically returning South to cities like Atlanta and Charlotte.
Understanding people and the cultures they come from helps us communicate and look past differences and misunderstandings, without a proper understanding of cultural differences and their subjectivity we assume cultural differences are malicious or 'bad' in some way and this only causes grief.
The New York Black experience is particularly instructive because it shows how cultural boundaries can be both resilient and permeable at the same time. Third and fourth-generation Caribbean-Americans might code-switch between Caribbean patois when talking to their grandparents and African American Vernacular English when hanging out with friends from different backgrounds. Great Migration descendants might maintain deep emotional connections to "down South" even if they've never lived there, organizing annual family reunions in Mississippi or South Carolina while fully participating in distinctly northern Black cultural institutions.
It is essential as a human being living in a society I believe to understand the people around you, their culture, their mores, and then and only then can you even begin to guess their intentions, which are ultimately all that matter when dealing with fellow humans, good vs bad intentions. The complexity is beautiful but also fragile, as communities get displaced by economic forces and younger generations become more culturally mixed, some of these distinct cultural patterns risk being flattened into a generic "Black culture" that loses the richness of its component parts. This would be a genuine loss for American cultural diversity.
Most arguments even online, especially ones that go viral, are just culture war between people that have zero cultural consciousness and think their 'culture' is actually 'their personality' and that its 'correct', this view is complete madness.
America isn’t post‑racial, it’s pre‑ethnographic; race flattens and culture thickens27, thus: if you want fewer culture wars, learn more cultures.